Entries in web
(187)

The Internet Map is an interactive, zoomable design that uses a combination of algorithms and the Google Earth API to display 350,000 websites as sized circles representing their overall traffic.

Designed by Ruslan Enikeev, the color-coding shows the country affiliations.

Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

Semantic web

The map of the Internet is a photo shot of the global network as of end of 2011 (however, baloons show actual statistics from Alexa). It encompasses over 350 thousand websites from 196 countries and all domain zones. Information about more than 2 million links between the websites has joined some of them together into topical clusters. As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.

The graph below shows how 24 of the most active subreddits have changed over time. I ordered the subreddits by the time that they first appeared on Reddit. I recommend zooming in so you can see it better.

(I should note that I purposely excluded /r/reddit.com from this graph because it dominates the entire graph until about 2008, then screws things up again when it got closed down in late 2011.)

The biggest thing that you may notice is that there were very few subreddits from 2006-2008. In fact, there was only one subreddit before 2006 (/r/reddit.com). The majority of the content in 2006-2008 was focused on more techie-friendly subjects: programming, science, politics, entertainment, and gaming. Major subreddits dedicated to solely picture and video content started becoming popular in mid-2008, and even then their posts only comprised less than 1/4 of Reddit’s content. It wasn’t until 2011 did the picture-related subreddits really start taking over, and Reddit never looked back after that.

This graph covers so many changes in the Reddit community that it can’t explain what happened by itself. In the following sections, I will take a closer look at how the Reddit community evolved on a year-by-year basis.

Love these data visualizations of the reddit’s evolution over time from Randy, a 3rd year Computer Science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University. In his original post, he actually visualizes each year separately, and you can see some major milestones and clear changes in the reddit universe.

The Great /r/reddit.com Spike of 2009

The total growth of reddit over the years is lost in the 100% Stacked Area chart; however, you can clearly see the growth of subreddit content as a portion of the whole.

What a wild year it’s been. You could say that 2013 was the year of social media and you’d be correct. What was once a novelty for people bored and surfing on the ‘net has risen to be an industry in and of itself that companies large and small have embraced around the world as a powerful cornerstone of their marketing initiatives.

In case you got lost in the details of 2013, we’ve laid out all the notable moments of the year, month by month, in this handy infographic.

There are a handful of statistics listed in the design that should have been visualized instead of just shown in text. The use of logos and images from the web do a good job of showing the specific events.

The Nmap Project is pleased to release our new and improved Icons of the Web project! Since our free and open source Nmap Security Scanner software is all about exploring networks at massive scale, we started by scanning the top million web sites for 2013 (as ranked by the analytics company Alexa). We then downloaded each site’s favicon—the small icon displayed next to a site title in browser bookmarks and tabs.

We scaled the icons in proportion to each site’s monthly reach (popularity) and placed them in a giant collage. The smallest icons—for sites visited by only 0.00004% of the Internet population each month—are 256 pixels square (16x16). The largest icon (Google) is 394 million pixels. The whole collage is 5 gigapixels.

This is an update to a similar project we performed in 2010. That edition proved very popular. It was written up in the New York Times and other sites, exhibited at the Newseum in Washington D.C., and even found its way into the Guinness Book of World Records (see the press section for more). It is interesting to compare the new data with the old to see how the Internet has evolved in recent years.

Since your web browser would likely choke on a 5 gigapixel image, we’ve created the interactive viewer below. It’s divided into 813,200 small files which are only loaded as needed based on your location and zoom level. Click and drag to pan and use the mouse wheel (or toolbar) to zoom. For mouse wheel zoom, you may need to interact with the viewer first (e.g. drag something). A new feature this year allows you to hover your mouse over an icon to see the site name. You can also click on icons to visit the actual sites, but be careful with that! Even even sites with cute icons (like the cartoon Hamster) can be pornographic or worse. We have also added a fullscreen viewing option.

To find your favorite site (or your own site), type in the domain name (example: reddit.com) and hit search.

Our most common request in 2010 was for a physical poster version. We only printed them for Nmap developers last time, but now we’re making them available to anyone who orders by January 17.

The Bot Traffic Report 2013 from Incapsula clearly shows that robots already rule the world…I mean the Internet. Humans are now just a minority of the traffic online.

We see a 21% growth in total bot traffic, which now represents 61.5% of website visitors. The bulk of that growth is attributed to increased visits by good bots (i.e., certified agents of legitimate software, such as search engines) whose presence increased from 20% to 31% in 2013.

31% of Bots Are Still Malicious, but with Much Fewer Spammers

While the relative percentage of malicious bots remains unchanged, there is a noticeable reduction in Spam Bot activity, which decreased from 2% in 2012 to 0.5% in 2013. The most plausible explanation for this steep decrease is Google’s anti-spam campaign, which includes the recent Penguin 2.0 and 2.1 updates.

Google’s 200 Ranking Factors is a very detailed list of the known 200 aspects that Google considers in their ranking formulas. The overall length of the infographic is the major visual feature that catches your attention, and communicates a clear message about Google’s immensely complicated algorithm and how difficult SEO can be. The second level of of the design is the actual details about each and every one of those ranking factors that the audience can read if they want specific information.

Google has confirmed that they use approximately 200 ranking signals in their algorithm. However, they’ve never publicly listed them all. While this infographic is by no means official, it aggregates the best information we have about how Google ranks pages and websites.

A Productive Day in the Life of a Social Media Marketer from Razor Social is a great use of an infographic design within a larger content strategy online. The larger piece is an article that lists out all 29 tools, with links and descriptions, but the infographic shows a character using all of the tools throughout the day. So the infographic grabs the attention of the audience and gets shared frequently, with links back to the full article.

The demands on us to market our products and services using social media is constantly increasing and the technology/tools required to support this is also increasing.

We start early morning and we finish late at night. How many of you check your Twitter or Facebook account last thing in the evening and first thing in the morning?

So we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at a very busy day in the life of a Social Media Marketer. During the day there are so many tools and tasks. If you work alone then we certainly wouldn’t expect you to do everything listed here or use all the tools we suggest, but if you are part of a team then you could share out the tasks and tools to make it easier.

A special thanks goes to Donna from Socially Sorted who is my go to person when I want anything visual done. Thanks Donna.

The infographic design does a good job of removing most of the text descriptions and just using icons and logos to represent the various tool. Interested readers can dig into the full article for more information.

The footer is missing the URL link back to landing page with the article. When people post infographics on blogs and social media sites, they aren’t always good about linking back to the original. By including the text URL in the infographic itself, you can make sure all of the readers can find the landing page.

Galorath Inc. (the SEER Cost, Schedule, Risk Model Developers) watched the healthcare.gov rollout difficulties, the outcries and finger pointing and decided to take a more analytical look. While it is easy to throw stones at stakeholders, this was a huge IT project and there were bound to be challenges. Could it have gone better? Sure. Were there adequate resources? Seems so. Should testing and quality assurance been more rigorous? Yes, but there didn’t appear to be adequate time. Were the requirements firmed up in advance? That could have been a significant contributor.

Although longer than I usually like for infographic designs, this one tackles a fairly complicated topic and breaks it down nicely. The use of icons and minimal text make this design easy for readers to skim through, but read the details they are interested in.

Many beliefs that email marketers hold true regarding email are simply false, according to research and analysis conducted by my email marketing agency, Alchemy Worx. We analyzed data sourced from our work with customers and industry figures to arrive at our conclusions.

Here are seven such email myths, which are also presented in an infographic at the end of this article.

Great information with fun illustrations that attract viewers. The statistics should be visualized though, instead of just shown in text. Big fonts are not data visualizations, and don’t make the data any easier to understand for the readers.

Footer has good information with full links to the sources, a clear copyright and the company logo. It’s only missing the URL link back to the infographic landing page so readers can find the orignal when people post it without a link back to the Alchemy Worx site.

No matter who you are and how good you look, it’s pretty easy to look terrible on a webcam. We teamed up with our friends at Mixergy to showcase just how NOT to look bad on a webcam with this handy infographic. By just following a few of our easy webcam tips, you’ll look as good as you feel in your next webcam interview. What do you think? Have any other tricks to add?

Nice instructional how-to infographic. There’s no data visualized, just illustrations of the 10 tips. Quick and easy to read. This design also has a long Online Lifespan. The topic is so universal, the infographic will be relevant for years!

The footer should include the text URL link to the infographic landing page on either Mixergy or Lemon.ly so when readers see smaller thumbnail versions posted on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ or blogs without a link, they can still find the original full-size version!